Vietnam: Vietnam Livestock Market Update

Vietnam’s livestock sector is facing many challenges, including the impacts of various disease outbreaks, the COVID-19 pandemic, and high feed costs. This has resulted in weak prices and squeezed margins for the domestic meat and poultry industries. Demand for livestock products has sharply fallen compared to the pre-COVID-19 period mainly due to consumers’ loss of income and closures of schools and the food service sector. Meanwhile, animal disease outbreaks, particularly the African Swine Fever (ASF) epidemic, are at risk of again spreading on a large scale. ASF outbreaks were ongoing in 48 out of 63 provinces in Vietnam, resulting in the death and culling of nearly 280,000 pigs with a total weight of about 11,678 metric tons (MT), about 3.6 times higher than the culled numbers in the same period of 2020.